If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

If your video camera doesn't have digital-out, then I'd recommend the Pinnacle Studio AV version 8 which is about US$129.99, including software and capture card. This card only captures analogue video.

If it turns out your video camera does actually have digital-out, then I'd suggest the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe which is about US$299.99 for the software and capture card. The card supports both analogue and digital video capture.

I have an ATI 8500DV AIW and the TV Tuner on it has gone bad (in less than 3 months) and it won't give any sound. I did a lot of troubleshooting and narrowed it down, but I have been too lazy to call ATI and see about sending it back
So I am not sure how much difference it makes if you spend a lot on one of those.

I have their old cheap'O TV Wonder VE and recently did some... "backing up" of some tapes off my VCR. The beta 7.6 drivers let you record it directly to Window Media Video so you can burn them on a CD and it will play on any computer made in the last 3 years pretty much. I do get a few frame drops though and the image quality is degraded a tiny bit do to WMV, but overall it is pretty good. I also only paid $30 (Best Buy had it on sale for $10 off and ATI had a $10 rebate) almost a year ago. I use it for recording TV shows mostly with its cool TV guild program. It does have an RCA in for VCRs and such. Just be warned, you will need to hook a partch cord from the TV Tuner card to your sound card and if you want to use it for video in you will need to unplug the TV tuner card to plug in the sound from the VCR or camcorder (or use a splitter.

Just an update....my ATI 8500DV AIW seems to be working okay. I hooked the cable up to it last night and was going to check all the sound card settings, but after I changed the video source (composite to S-video to cable), the sound worked. I haven't what that did, but it is functioning properly now.

I am even happier now. Now that I can record to WMV. I had just recorded a tape from a VCR to my ATI TV Wonder VE and the file turned out just under 800MB, so it would not fit on a CD. Well I loaded up Window's Movie Maker II (for the first time) and found that it now has some cool features. One lets you target how big of a file you want. I set it to 700MB and it ended up at 675MB without having to drop the resolution or frame rates. Image looks almost the same (not too bad for a rented VCR tape). I think it even has a feature to copy it directly to a CD for you, but I perfer to us Nero for that.

The only downside I saw was a few dropped frames near the beginning, likely do to my slow CPU (man 1.4Ghz is slow... that's odd). Of corse WMM2 recommends 512MBH and a 1.5Ghz CPU. That's pretty mighty for an app included in Windows XP Pro (which only recommends about half the memory and CPU speed).

Anything using a PCI slot will be slower than a AGP cardwith video in built in (no pun).

Look for a card with VIVO. Price is about the same and it's faster.

I disagree. All professional video capture cards for PC's make use of the PCI slot. Whether or not AGP is faster makes absolutely no difference, because the PCI slot provides sufficient bandwidth. A video card with VIVO is often crippled in terms of drivers because the company producing them is primarily a video card company, not a capture card company. I find this is especially the case with nVidia based video cards.

Quality of the capture is also important and you'll find video cards with VIVO are no where near up to standard when compared to dedicated capture cards.

if you want to capture from analogue video (e.g. C-VHS, Video8 or variants) or video then a standard PCI TV will do that. Most have a composite video input and some have a S-Video input. To capture the sound you connect the sound output from the source to the line in of your sound card.

The Pinnacle PCTV Rave is about £30 and the Hauppage WinTV is around £40.

If you want to record the results of editing back to video tape or TV you need a videocard with a TV out.

Video takes large amounts of disk space. (I think an uncompressed AVI is about 1Gb/min). Capturing to compressed formats like MPEG requires a decent processor to do the encoding on the fly. Deciding what format to capture in and capture resolution can be tricky at first.